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Summer goals progress | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 1 01 July 2007 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
It's been a month since I posted my summer goals, so it seems time to review how they are going.
I've read two novels ("L'isola del Tonal" and "Un cuore pulito"), one book on Switzerland ("Istituzioni Politiche Svizzere"), and one miscellaneous non-fiction book ("Come insegnare la lingua straniera"). I'm slightly more comfortable with the conditional and subjunctive, but not very much so. On the positive side, I'm much more comfortable reading texts which use the passato remoto, as L'isola del Tonal did so heavily. My use of prepositions is improving - they're one of my major mistakes with the Assimil active wave, but I'm getting some right which I used to consistently get wrong, and paying attention to the ones I still do. When I get corrections speaking Italian from others, it rarely involves prepositions now; this is hopefully a good sign. I put a few things into mnemosyne, but I've ignored it. I've been continuing to ignore newspapers, which is bad; I need to get more in touch with what's happening in my region.
I've been doing a minimum here, and just using Assimil. I'm making progress; the French in "Le Persan sans Peine" is somewhat easier to read than it was when I started using the course, and tenses aren't confusing me anywhere near as much. The best thing I've done for my French recently is picked up proofreading for Project Gutenberg, as this makes me pay close attention to where there are accented letters, and which accent is present. My listening comprehension is probably increasing; at an absolute minimum, there's often a chunk within each new Assimil lesson which I misunderstand when I only hear it orally, and which I can understand correctly by the end of the lesson.
I'm quite happy with how my German is coming along. I make fairly few mistakes writing it out in the active phase, thus far; in the 3 lessons I've done, I don't think I've made a single gender or case mistake. I've been using Assimil, and I've just started using siomotteikiru's method, which I love. I've abandoned the idea of using "Die Schweiz vom Bau der Alpen bis zur Frage nach der Zukunft" as a learning tool for a while yet; the language is too ornate for me to handle.
I'm making progress on all of these goals. I haven't had any big breakthroughs, don't know all of the affixes, and make far more correlative mistakes than I'd like - but I've learned quite a few fundamental constructs which I was previously missing, and my comprehension of my Esperanto music has increased. My vocabulary is also increasing at a decent pace, thanks to lernu's courses.
I'm happy with how Dutch is going. When I come across pages written in Dutch, I can pick out a fair amount of the meaning, though I still miss a significant amount. I haven't listened to any Dutch outside of Assimil recently.
I'd consider myself well-accustomed to the sounds. I'm still far from being able to make light chatter though, I'd say. I'm out of excuses for not learning the writing system yet - but I still haven't done it. Oops. I've found that I enjoy some Persian music, which should be a helpful motivator.
I've -mainly- managed to avoid Japanese. I spent a bit over an hour talking (in writing, not orally) to a Japanese person yesterday, but mainly in English. She threw a few basic phrases in Japanese at me (ie, "esperanto ha nani desuka?", and I managed to handle all of them, and used a few myself. It's been fairly hard not to start studying Japanese again; I miss it.
I tried the onion approach. Overall, I wasn't happy with it. Persian sounds very familiar to me now, and I can shadow the first lessons, largely from memory, correctly, with good pronunciation, but my ability to produce Persian, or to understand the lessons which I didn't cover during the 6-week challenge, has barely increased. I haven't been using the sentence method with mnemosyne at all. I have been paying close attention to sentences which strike me, but for the most part, I'm not recording them. Heavy grammar study will wait until I've read more about linguistics and grammar. I'm starting to work through "An introduction to the languages of the world"; the rest of the books I've ordered on related subjects haven't arrived yet. I'm learning a fair amount of grammar even from this book. The closest I've gone to controlled wanderlust is reading the grammatical parts of the aforementioned book, and this sketch of Quechua. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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